No, even in this thread, people mostly cleared it.
You're pretty much the only person who has cleared it and is claiming it needs to drop better gear.
No it's not, unless you want to compare the difficulty of Revan VS LR-5 or Mentor VS Sav-Rak
Yes, and Bulwark got nerfed, if it was still so hard with the same drop people won't be willing to do D7 that much.
No people wouldn't run D7 once they got there Aratech. Doesn't mean it needed to be changed, but if you're rewarding people with BH comms for doing a PUG run, you better not penalise them heavily for getting some bad RNG.
There are HM and the SM of these is to know the HM well enough, LI is different.
You can run SM LI to get most of the mechanics but HM adds a couple and makes the existing ones more punishing. This is EXACTLY the same as TFB and EC (Fearful, Overload, Gift of the Masters, Incubation and Lightning Field come to mind as either being new brutal or just more brutal than they were).